Nature preserve highlights water conservation

The Bellagio Hotel's three-hectare fountain on the Las Vegas strip, with its 1,000 jets and twice-an-hour choreographed water shows, evokes a sense of tropical luxury.

About five kilometres west, bordered by major thoroughfares, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is spearheading construction of a $310-million US nature preserve to remind people they are in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

"[Las Vegas] is a community that should not exist by any stretch of the imagination," Isaac Marshall, a principal of the Vancouver design firm AldrichPears Associates, which helped guide the centre's creation.

"And yet it's the fastest-growing city in North America, and has been ... for the last six years. Six thousand people a month move [to Las Vegas] and have no clue they're moving into a completely unsustainable lifestyle."

That is where the Las Vegas Springs Preserve comes in. It is a 72-hectare section of desert which sits on top of the artesian springs that were Las Vegas' reason for being. Its waters provided sustenance for the Mojave Desert's Anasazi and Paiute peoples and an oasis for the first European settlers.

Poignantly, those springs stopped running decades ago, Marshall said, but the site has been recreated as way to recapture the springs' cultural history and show today's Las Vegas residents and visitors a way forward.

It has been an eight-year project for AldrichPears, slated to conclude with the preserve's opening in June.

Marshall said Las Vegas Springs Preserve is the brainchild of Patricia Mulroy, general manager of South Nevada Water Authority for the past 16 years. At one point, Las Vegas' water crisis was so severe, Mulroy was told the city would run out of water by 2008.
Mulroy contacted AldrichPears in 1999 for help drawing up a water conservation program that could be used to engage the public.

Marshall told Mulroy that water conservation wasn't really something that AldrichPears did. The firm is known for designing museum, science and cultural centre exhibits. But in corresponding with the water authority, Marshall added that the firm realized there was something it could do to highlight the need for sustainable living in the desert.

AldrichPears drew up a master plan for the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, which includes natural gardens, a desert wetland created by channelling rainwater and runoff from adjacent neighbourhoods that has been a magnet for hundreds of wild birds.

The site also incorporates a new Nevada State Museum (that won't be open until 2008), the Origen Experience visitors' centre and a Desert Living Center, which AldrichPears also designed. All buildings are energy efficient and limit their impact on the environment.

Marshall described the living centre as the preserve's "jewel," because it will be a resource centre for Las Vegas residents, showing them how to reduce their water use and live more in harmony with the desert environment.

"We're trying to inspire them to take actions to affect their lives," Marshall said.

Marshall added that the centre will have a big impact if it can change the behaviour of one per cent of Las Vegas' 1.6 million permanent residents and 42 million annual visitors.

And for the record, Marshall noted that the Bellagio's fountain, as ostentatious as it seems, is actually a model of sustainability. The hotel taps runoff water that is trapped beneath the desert but blocked from getting back into the city's aquifers.

The fountain water is then used to flush toilets and water its lawns, and when it goes down the drain, is recycled in the city's state-of-the-art treatment system as fresh water for the city.

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LAS VEGAS OASIS
Vancouver's AldrichPears Associates hopes to change behaviours with the creation of a centre to demonstrate sustainable desert living.

• 1.62 million: Las Vegas/Clark County population.

• 6,000 people move there each month.

• 60% of water is used by residential dwellings.

• 90% of residential water is used to water lawns and gardens.

© Pacific Newspaper Group Inc. (The Vancouver Sun/The province), a CanWest Company. Provided for information only- no endorsement is made or implied. 2007

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